>> Has anyone made the argument for keeping the GIL to discourage >> threading? > > Oooh, you are on to my secret plan! :-)
I completely agree that there are other approaches to parallelism and concurrency that are much better than threading. However, I don't think this is a good argument for having poor support for parallel threads in Python (i.e. keeping the GIL). The reason is that threads are extremely useful (and often required) for implementing other approaches to concurrency, such as message passing. Two examples: Take Erlang for example. Erlang uses a shared nothing/message passing approach to concurrency (Yes!). However, Erlangs implementation of this approach relies heavily upon threads in the low-level of the interpreter. Without this usage of threads Erlang would be able to provide the multicore scalability that it does using message passing. Same is true of MPI. From the user's perspective MPI is just message passing. But, MPI implementations use threads internally extensively. Bottom line: threads may be a bad end in themselves (I agree with this), but they are a great means to better things. Cheers, Brian _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
